THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Thank you. Mr.
Vice President, Madam Secretary, Mr. Nye, Prime Minister Shipley,
Vice President Bell, to the leaders of other nations and
international organizations; Mr. Smith, to the Ford Foundation and
all the others from the private sector in America; and I want to say
a special word of thanks to the employees of our government who are
here, without which none of this could be done.

I was glad to hear the joke that the representatives
from Thailand told yesterday. I have cut a lot of red tape sideways
in my life. I was glad to hear you laugh at the Vice President's
remark about using plain language in government regulations. I this
that must be a common problem throughout the world. But mostly, I'm
glad to see you in such a good frame of mind about this.

You know, one of the problems with having a continuous
reinventing government effort is that it almost never gets any
headlines in the newspaper and most people who cover it think it is
about as exciting as watching paint dry. (Laughter.) So I think
that means that if you're going to do this you need sort of an extra
dose of determination and good humor, because I believe it is truly
one of the most important things that those of us in public life
today can do.

I've been interested in this for a long time. When I
was the governor of my state we had what I believe was the first
state government-wide ongoing effort in the country. When I became
President I knew we had to change old policies and old ways of doing
things. Besides we were flat broke and running a huge deficit. And
even worse, the American people had a very low level of confidence in
the government. I used to say that everyone in America thinks that
our government would foul up a two-car parade. We wanted to change
all that. We knew it was important for our economy. We knew it was
important for our political success. We knew it was important for
the integrity of our democracy.

Fortunately for me, Vice President Gore agreed. And he
approached this task as he does everything he really cares about,
with an astonishing amount of energy, determination and intelligence.
And I'm sure you have seen, he has absorbed about everything there is
to absorb about this subject. And if you hang around long enough, he
will give you a chance to know everything he knows about it.
(Laughter.)

We have a theory about this -- most people think it's so
boring we have to have a joke every three minutes when discussing it.
(Laughter.) But it is very serious. When the history of our time
here is written, the leadership of the Vice President in doing this
will be one of the signal achievements of this administration and I am
very, very grateful to him for a superb job. (Applause.)

We also are heavily into reinventing speeches -- here
you see I crossed out the first paragraph and I go from page one to
page three. So you'll be out of pain before you know it.
(Laughter.)

Let me also say to you we have a selfish reason in
hosting this conference. We've not tried to reinvent the wheel, we
have tried to borrow good ideas wherever we could find them. We very
much want to know what is going on in every other country in the
world, just as we want to be helpful to every other country in the
world if we can.

I'd like to make just one or two points if I might.
First is one you know, but I think it bears repeating: This will not
work if it is a one-shot effort, if it is something that happens for
a month or six months or even for a year. In fact, I think you
should measure your success in part by whether you have put in a
system so integral to the operation of government -- a process -- and
whether you have imbedded in the public's mind the importance of this
to the extent that all your successors in whatever offices you hold
will have to follow suit. That, I think, is the ultimate measure of
whether we are successful.

Because no matter how long you serve, no matter how hard
you work, you will either leave things on the table that are undone,
or new opportunities will emerge with the revolutions and technology
in human organization that are constantly unfolding.

Our basic theory has been that we ought to have a
government for the Information Age that is smaller, that lives within
its means, but that actually is capable of doing more of what needs
to be done. We believe what needs to be done is that we should focus
mostly on giving people the tools they need to solve their own
problems. We should help people who, through no fault of their own,
can't get along through life without help. But most of what we
should be doing is creating the conditions and giving people the
tools to make their lives as dynamic as the world in which we live.

I also want to emphasize again how important it is to be
able to stand up and say that we are giving people good value for
their tax investment, because I found that our people tend to judge
the reinventing government sometimes not by what we think they would.
It sounds very impressive to say we have the smallest federal
government since John Kennedy was President because we are a much
bigger government. But people want to know, well, how does that
affect me. If you say we've saved $138 billion that helped us balance
the budget, bring interest rates down, and lower their mortgage rates,
that's something people can understand.

If you say we reformed welfare, that sounds good. But
if you say we have the smallest welfare rolls in 29 years and we have
gotten a lot of people into the work force, but helped them with
child care and education and transportation, so we're not just
putting out numbers and behind it there are human people suffering
because they were cut out of the safety net, that means something.

If you can say to a small business person, it used to
take weeks or months for us to process your request for a loan and
now it takes a matter of days, and the form was once an inch thick
and now it's a page long, that means something to people because it
affects their lives.

And so I would say to all of you -- I made a lot of
jokes about it, but I do think we have to find ways to talk about
this that make it interesting to our people and that bring it home to
them, because that is the best guarantee of our continuing to work.

One other point I'd like to make is for national
governments -- most national governments have regulatory and other
relationships with the private sector and also have financial
relationships with local government. I believe a very important and
increasingly important aspect of this whole reinventing government
issue will be how do national governments relate to their private
sector. We're trying harder and harder to do less regulation and
instead to create incentives and frameworks to solve problems that
meet national goals. How do national governments relate to local
governments? This is very controversial in our country from time to
time. My theory is, just because we gave out money last year in the
way we've been giving it out for 20 years -- in education, law
enforcement or any other issue -- doesn't mean we should continue to
give the money out that way if it doesn't work anymore.

We had this huge argument back in 1994 when we tried to
pass a crime bill because, interestingly enough, our conservatives
argued that it was wrong for the federal government to give money to
local governments only if they would agree to hire police officers
and put them on the street and have them work in a certain way. But
we had learned from local governments that work that that was all
that works to bring the crime rate down. So we jammed through this
bill and the people who were against it screamed and hollered that I
was presuming to tell police chiefs what to do. Nothing could have
been further than the truth -- the police chief told me what to do.
And what we told the people -- between the President and the Congress
and the police chiefs -- was, you can't have this money unless you do
what they say works.

And we now have the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the
lowest murder rate in 30 years, partly because of the improvement in
the economy, but partly because law enforcement works better. We
have gone 30 years in which we had tripled the crime rate -- violent
crime rate -- and increased our police forces only 10 percent.

So I think that there is a way in which we should look
not only to the internal operations of our own government, how our
systems work and how they serve the people, but how the relationship
between government and the private sectors and national governments
and local governments can work more effectively.

Finally, let me say that I think that we have -- and
I'm sure all of you already know this -- but I think we have a very
strong vested interest in each other's success. If we didn't learn
anything from 1998 and the financial turmoil we experienced all over
the world, it is that in the world we live in competition is good,
but failure of our competitors is bad. Competition is good, but the
failure of our competitors is bad. We want competition to work
within a framework in which we all do better, in which we urge each
other on, economically, socially, politically, every way to higher
levels of humane development -- so that the United States, for
example, clearly has an interest when the government of Russia tries
to put in place a system that will fairly assess and collect taxes.

Quite apart from the obvious interest we have, and all
of you do, in having a system that will help us to continue to reduce
the nuclear threat, the United States has an interest in
the success of governments in Asia developing regulatory systems that
will minimize the spread of financial contagion. We have an interest
in nations in Africa and in Latin America and elsewhere who are
trying to develop with limited resources the very best possible
education and health systems. We have an interest in learning from
nations all over the world that have done a better job than we have
in managing their natural resources and developing sound
environmental policy while growing their economy.

We have an interest in seeing how the European nations
are trying to adapt their social welfare systems that were created
after World War II to the demands of the Information Age, so that
they can lower unemployment, increase job growth and still maintain
the integrity of a genuine social safety net -- a big issue for
developed countries. We have lower unemployment and greater
inequality; they have more equality and higher unemployment. How can
we bridge the gap? And we're interested in the experiments in Great
Britain and the experiments in the Netherlands and in other
countries. We have an interest, and if those countries succeed, we
are not threatened -- our lives are enhanced. And I think we should
all have that attitude.

Finally, let me say that this is about more than
economics. It's even about more than having our customers happy,
although I must say one of the biggest kicks I've gotten as President
is when a major national business magazine said that the Social
Security Agency was the best large organization in America, public or
private, at providing telephone service to its customers. I like
that. (Applause.)

This is about, in my judgment, the preservation of the
vitality of democracy. In some countries that are new democracies,
it may be about the preservation of democracy itself. But in the
end, every one of us serves because people believe in the possibility
of self-government through representatives. To the extent that
people do not believe their representatives will handle their money
for public purposes the way they themselves would, democracy itself
is diminished. Human potential is diminished. The capacity for
worldwide cooperation is diminished.

So I say again, you may not get the headlines back home
for this. You may have to tell your own jokes because you won't be
able to make anybody else laugh. But never underestimate the
profound and enduring importance of what it is you have come here to
discuss. We are honored to have you here, and we thank you for your
contribution and your dedication.